Editorial: Overall Impressions of the Summer Games

So it's nearly been a month since the ROBLOX Summer Games ended and it's about time I shared my thoughts on the event: both the positive and negatives aspects which users and myself have noted. I will be breaking down my thoughts on the different sections that made up the Summer Games, including: the user-sourced games chosen, the gameplay, the prizes, and of course the somewhat controversial use of playerpoints and an exclusive leaderboard system to calculate winners. During this article, I will be making some comparisons to other official ROBLOX events, but please note I will be judging the event purely on its own merits.


Before we dig in, let us first take a step back and discuss the background of the event itself. Following in the footsteps of the largely successful ROBLOX Winter Games which could be played throughout February 2014, the Summer Games sought to build on its achievements. This Summer's event utilised the new 'Playerpoints' introduced by the ROBOX team - points earned in-game, distributed by the developer as they see fit for in-game activities and achievements. Each game has a pot of playerpoints to distribute, with the exact number of points dictated by the amount of Robux spent by players on things such as game passes and consumables. This means the playerpoints pots can de facto run-out, an issue I will be covering later in this editorial. Playerpoints earned are displayed on player profiles next to the white star symbol and players are placed on a leaderboard for weekly, monthly, and all-time playerpoint scores. The key similarity with the Winter Games is that the games chosen were user-created. The main difference is that these games were not purpose built for the Summer Games like some of those featured in the Winter Games, but already existed before the event. However, that's enough background. Time to get into the editorial!

Editorial: Spotlight of Silence [BETA]

Single-player games are a rare occurrence on ROBLOX, with a more general focus on massive-multiplayer experiences and ever-growing server sizes (we are up to 50 now!) in games such as Reason 2 Die and many group personal servers.

However, Silence, a game created by Venvious exploded onto the scene, appearing near the top of the popular games category for a period of time. At the time of writing it has received 135,064 plays, has been favourited 8,119 times, and has a very high approval rating with 3,660 thumbs up and 403 thumbs down. 
Link: Silence [BETA]

*Warning possible spoilers ahead* 

ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013 Guide!

Greetings fellow egg hoarders! Today I bring you a comprehensive eggsponential guide of every egg that is currently available within the ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013, which was beautifully crafted by the ROBLOX content team. The spawn areas, special abilities and tips to obtaining each egg will be detailed below along with important information about the map. (I promise - no more egg puns).

The Egg Hunt is a game published by the staff account named 'Games'; being joint-created by Tarabyte, Sorcus, Stickmasterluke and Brighteyes to name a few. The place has been visited a total of 1,367,732 times and has experienced 17,000 concurrent players making it easily the most popular ROBLOX event EVER. There are a total of 24 eggs that can currently be collected by players and all can be worn as hats. As of writing there are three unreleased badges which are all likely to be eggs that can be only be obtained on certain days of the hunt. These exclusive eggs will be added to the guide as the hunt progresses.

Egg Hunt Map

So without further ado, here is the ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013 guide: 
(use CTRL-F to find the specific egg you are looking for)

                     
                       Watermelon
This egg spawns in the grassland area very close to the ring of teleporters. It is a common egg with several appearing on the map at once and can be easily obtained with the player simply walking over it. Once the egg is collected, pieces of melon scatter around the player's feet - a juicy touch.

ROBLOX Contests: Making a Comeback!

The ROBLOX staff stated at the beginning of the month that this year they wish to bring about more community involvement and discussion to the site. They said they will listen to users more and will play a significantly larger role on the ROBLOX Forums.

The ROBLOX team now have a growing community team dedicated to discussing ideas and suggestions with users within the ROBLOX Community Staff and Forum Users group. The group is host to a friendly environment in which users and staff can chat casually, but also home to a number of Personal Build Servers built for the community enjoyment. These servers are owned and managed by users within the group and are open to all with building privileges given to member's of the 'forumer' rank or above. 

Visiting one of the many Personal Build Servers 

Now, this an excellent step forward for the ROBLOX corporation. But how will some of the less aware users become more community involved once again? 

The answer to that is simple: contests. 

Back in 2010, ROBLOX unveiled the first official Contest System. It had it's own page, leader-boards  prizes and even sponsors. Contests were hosted regularly, each with a different theme and aim. 

Originally, there was talk of ROBLOX Contests being based around several different areas of the ROBLOX site; Places, Shirts, T-Shirts and models, but this most of these ideals were dropped in favour of the classic building contests. These contests ran until early 2012, then suddenly were abandoned.

Why was it abandoned?

The contest system, while being enjoyable for some users, was heavily exploited by a large majority. This exploitation took shape in the form of the notorious 'Free Model'. If you were to take a peak at the leaders of each contest you would notice a sinister pattern emerging; every single place looked the same. 

You may ask: how? Surely users did not share their work with others and make their creations available to the public domain? And you would be correct. The problem is that early on in after the contest's launch, one user would find an old model that matched the theme of the place. Often this model would be an entire place  uploaded by a user (perhaps stolen). The user would then upload this to their contest entry and voilà; a quality place that would surely win votes that required no effort. 

What made matters worse was the fact that these games were purely voted for based on their aesthetics. A large percentage of contest entries had no gameplay elements, no tools and no objectives. You would simply enter the place and have absolutely nothing to do. Entrants would also use the infamous '+2/3/4/5 voting accuracy' tagline on their game, trying to persuade users to vote for their game.

Both of these habits had a very negative effect on the contest ethic and with each subsequent contest, less and less effort was put into entries. 

ROBLOX Contests 2013

Everything is set to change however as contests are returning. We are only 3 weeks into January and and a ROBLOX Contest has been launched already. The ROBLOX Studio 2.0 Splashscreen contest was launched on the 10th January 2013 and asks users to create a splashcreen (loading graphic) for the new ROBLOX Studio (2.0). For more details on how to enter the contest, click HERE

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However, the more exciting news is that a revamped Contest System is being developed by the ROBLOX Team. This was confirmed by the two following pieces of evidence:

Tweet from BeckyLee - ReeseMcBlox (Community Manager) stated contests were in the works

Forum post by the VP of Marketing stating that a new contest system was coming

This will likely include a rebuilt voting system, tighter controls on the way contest entries are presented and marketed and perhaps even pre-selected models which they are allowed to do - this could be implemented with a special version of the ROBLOX Studio tailored to contests. 

A new year, with lots to look forward to! I can't wait to start entering contests again!

Thanks for reading!

-Arbirator

Editor of Roblox News

On iOS, ROBLOX opens all games to those without membership

You've been living under a rock for the past month, Roblox has recently released its mobile version onto the iOS platform and you can get your hands on it if you have a iPad 2+, iPhone 4+, or a iPod Touch 5th generation. You can download it for free by searching the word "Roblox" in the App Store.

The app allows you to join games which are normally only accessible on a PC and play with your friends. However, since it is on a mobile device, it has some limitations as far as performance and the complexity of games go. Shedletsky recently posted on IronNoob about this and said that the mobile version can handle up to "15k non-moving blocks and  200 moving blocks, otherwise performance will suffer."

All this sounded good until the release day came. Roblox announced that NBC members will only be able to play 8 selected games. This surprised me very much as they have never attempted to limit the games users would be able to play (except Builder's Club only places, which were a failed experiment) and them doing it on the iOS just seemed to be really out of the ordinary.

Good new came in today though, as Roblox just made a blog post announcing their decision to allow everyone to play every game. I'm actually really surprised by this considering their past actions regarding "BC test features" *cough* packages *cough* which still have not been released to the general public even though they have clearly been out of testing.

For me, this is less of an issue about being to play games on the go, but more about Roblox's bettering of their business practices. If you remember from some time ago, a user accessing the "Upgrade" tab of the Roblox site would have the cheapest option of Builder's Club hidden. And they would have to press a tiny button to reveal it. This really showed their greed as they hid the cheapest membership option, driving the less knowledgeable folks towards more expensive options they perhaps do not need. This was thankfully reverted.

They proved with this update that they are still a reputable company who actually keeps their consumers in mind, even if it is just once in a while. I applaud them for this and hope they continue to prosper.

-yomamadude6

What has Roblox done right, what has it done wrong.

Let's all be honest here, we all love Roblox dearly (or at least I'm inferring that from your reading of this Roblox fan-blog), however, we all know things that Roblox has done wrong or has yet to accomplish. You might not see some of the things I see in this article, and I might not notice the ones you do, so please leave a comment if you want to make me aware of something I didn't talk about.

Of course, before we talk about the goods and bads of Roblox, I have to mention that this is my personal opinion and that you do not have to agree on it (I hope you don't take my word 100%, I don't want to brain wash you). Also, I'll be talking about the pros and cons from a semi-experienced Roblox player's point of view, so you won't see things such as "this game has lots of lag."

It is courtesy to take a look at the good side before I dive into the criticisms. So let's get started!

As you all know, Roblox is a place for kids and teenagers to both have fun and express their creativity, programming skills, design skills, and economic skills. And Roblox nails these quite well, on a basic level at least.

With regards to creativity, there seem to be two types that exist in the game. One which is outside the game, like customizing your character, and one in game, for example, building a dream house. While in-game creativity can be expressed well because Roblox does not have too much competition (Minecraft does not allow scripting), the out of game one is not done well.


Character creation and customization alone is not enough to satisfy my personal hunger for expression. Let's compare this to a similar game (on the "out of game" side at least) Neopets. 

Many of you might have heard or even played this virtual pets game. Although it is aimed at young kids with its adorable art style and cutesy flash games, there is a large adult community present (I would estimate 8-12% of the population is ages 25+). 

The reasons for this could be many things, however, I am here to examine what this game has done right that Roblox has not done. For one, Neopets actually supports communities outside of the actual game; meaning that fanblogs (like this one), forums, and many user designed things actually get frequent spotlights to bring more attention to them. Roblox's not supporting of user-generated content outside of the official game means people are more likely to quit the game, as they have no strong community to fall back on (I don't consider groups strong communities).

Character customization is equally strong in both games, just with different styles. This is one part Roblox has done right: regularly releasing hats. 

The next part I feel Neopets has done that would make Roblox a better game is the economy. For one, Neopets has a stock market, but I don't feel it would be a great addition to Roblox anyway because of the randomness and easy profits (inflating the economy). 

Preview of crafting from
Roblox's blog.

But one things that does need to be in Roblox is the addition of "tradeable" consumable items that can be redeemed for "non-tradeable" hats/gears. This would add tons of dynamic economical shifts to Roblox (something it lacks dearly) and make playing with the economy more interesting and ultimately more profitable. 

The above could be solved with the introduction of crafting though. Soon™

Last thing that Neopets does is having a great deal of community interaction/involvement. It frequently hosts art spotlights, HTML spotlights, etc. while Roblox has NONE of these. The lack of these does nothing good to hold the community together, instead, it makes the community feel non-existent, void, empty.

Overall, I think Roblox is a really strong game that benefits from its unique game engine. However, it really needs more features added  to improve the community around it as well as the economy that drives it.

-yomamadude6

edit: Spelling

P.S. More place reviews will be coming ;)